The Duties & Rights of Simone Weil by Eric Hepburn

For International Women's Day, we'll continue our exploration of the work of Simone Weil - moving from her work on attention as spiritual practice, to her social justice oriented work on the necessity of duties preceding rights.

"Beloved community is not where everyone gets their rights. It is where everyone has taken up their obligations." The second service in a three-part Simone Weil series honoring Women's History Month — delivered on International Women's Day — centers Weil's inversion from The Need for Roots: the notion of obligations comes before that of rights, and a right that no one's obligation makes real is not worth very much.

The Great World House offers Weil's biography: first in her class at the École Normale Supérieure (Simone de Beauvoir graduated second), a philosopher who worked factory floors to understand labor from the inside, drawn powerfully toward Catholicism yet refusing baptism to remain at the threshold in solidarity with those outside — a Catholic bodhisattva — and dead at thirty-four, having refused to eat more than the ration allotted to occupied France.

The sermon unpacks the inversion against our rights-saturated argument culture: a child's right not to go hungry is empty rhetoric until someone tills, harvests, and puts food on the plate. Rights are not self-executing; they grow up like a garden from the soil of accepted obligation. Along the way: fairness (the unfolding we don't control) distinguished from justice (what we do in the face of unfairness); why obligations planted in resentment yield a harvest of resentment; entitlement ("I have rights but no obligations") versus the gift perspective ("I'm not owed anything — I have been gifted; how may I gift in return?"); and war's tax on the emotional bandwidth we bring to one another.

https://youtu.be/TVOEqQd9Ez0

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The Pulpiteer Podcast Transcript

Lightly edited for readability: transcription errors corrected, filler words reduced, punctuation repaired. Bracketed items are editorial.

[00:00:00] Eric Hepburn (host intro): Welcome to the twenty-sixth episode of the second season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode. Today's episode is called "Simone Weil's Obligations and Rights." It's the second episode in our three-part Simone Weil series honoring Women's History Month. Today, we'll focus on her evolution of obligations and rights. This week, we'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then move into our Voice of Wisdom, delivered by Beth Gehrman.

The Great World House — Eric Hepburn

We now pause to honor the Great World House, of which we are a part — lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.

For Women's History Month, I'm doing a three-part sermon series on Simone Weil. And so I thought I would share with you, as our Great World House today, some of her biography — so you can know from whence these words and ideas came.

Simone Weil was born in 1909. She died in 1943. She was a French philosopher, a mystic, and a political activist whose life produced one of the twentieth century's most searingly original bodies of thought. Trained at the École Normale Supérieure under Alain, she graduated first in her class — the same year Simone de Beauvoir graduated second. A fact that delighted her, and surprised no one who knew her.

She was not content to philosophize from a distance. She worked factory floors to understand industrial labor from the inside, fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War, and organized solidarity efforts for French workers during the Depression. Her thinking moved restlessly across philosophy, mathematics, Greek literature, Hindu scripture, and Christian mysticism, without settling comfortably in any tradition. She was drawn powerfully toward Catholicism, but refused baptism — believing her place was to remain at the threshold, in solidarity with those outside. Never heard of a Catholic bodhisattva before. What a blessing.

That posture — of remaining at the margins, of refusing the comfort of belonging in order to stay present to suffering — runs through everything she wrote. Her most enduring works — The Need for Roots, Waiting for God, and the posthumously assembled Gravity and Grace — grapple with affliction, attention, obligation, and the nature of justice, with an unsparing rigor that has made her essential reading for theologians, political theorists, and philosophers alike.

She died in 1943, at the age of thirty-four, in a sanatorium in England — having refused to eat more than the ration allotted to occupied French civilians. Even her death was an act of witness.

A Voice of Wisdom — read by Beth Gehrman

Let us enter a still place within, opening our hearts and minds to receive this Voice of Wisdom. After the words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence, preparing ourselves for the Word unfolding among us.

Together, we listen for wisdom in the words of Simone Weil:

"The notion of obligations comes before that of rights. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much."

Let's take time to breathe together.

The Sermon: Simone Weil's Obligations and Rights — Eric Hepburn

"Obligations come before rights. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much."

Now — remember that Simone was a French philosopher. Her job was not to create easily digestible, pulpit-worthy things, but to be precise in her use of language, in a way that hopefully produces deeper clarity. So let's try to unpack this philosophical stance into something that resonates with us, and with how we want to build community with one another.

We're familiar with how Dr. King defined beloved community. Simone Weil would define it this way: beloved community is not where everyone gets their rights. It is where everyone has taken up their obligations. Let me say that again. Beloved community is not where everyone gets their rights. It's where everyone has taken up the mantle and burden of their obligations.

We are living in a rights-saturated argument culture — everyone asserting, and few asking what grounds the assertion of those rights. "Mississippi Goddam" is a rights song. But Nina [Simone] knew something deeper was wrong than the rights being denied. And that is Simone Weil's contribution: that it was the obligations — the ones that produce the space for the rights — that were unfulfilled.

"I have a right not to go hungry as a child." Okay — cool. But all you're saying is: I don't think we should live in a world where children go hungry. Somebody in the community has to say, "I will go till the land." And somebody else has to harvest the food from the land. And somebody else has to prepare it, and put it on that child's plate — or they don't eat. No matter what you think about how the world should be: if no one accepts the mantle of obligation, the right is empty rhetoric about how you wish things were. Is this resonating for folks? All right — nod at me a little bit. I won't make you "amen" me.

Rights are not self-executing. They live or die in the moral imagination of a community — in the day-to-day actions of that community, its people, its institutions, its culture. "I have a right to protest." Okay — what does that mean? I'm going to go walk in the street; I've got my sign; I'm going to raise my voice. My right to not get arrested is only as good as law enforcement's obligation not to arrest me if I didn't break the rules. My right to write what I want on the sign is only as good as someone else's restraint — that their disagreement doesn't result in them deciding to kill me for writing words they don't agree with. Do you see the picture I'm trying to paint? We want to talk, in our culture, about rights without talking about the responsibilities and obligations that produce the space for those rights. And I think Simone Weil is deeply right that this is why we keep putting the cart in front of the horse — and then wondering why it gets stuck. It gets stuck because our narrative about freedom makes us obligation-ill. Allergic. Our narratives about freedom and rights make us allergic to the obligations that are the real ground of those things. We like our freedom abstract. We like our freedom idealistically unrestrained, uncontained, unlimited. And it is very uncomfortable for us to acknowledge that our freedoms can only exist in containers made by the careful holding of our fellow people.

I think it's worth, at this moment, distinguishing two words from each other. They often get used in overlapping ways, but a discrete definition for each helps us see the truth of the matter. I think it's most useful to use the word fairness about the unfolding of things over which we do not have control. Anybody in here still under the illusion that life is fair? Okay — I don't see any hands going up. That's a good sign. We know the universe doesn't unfold in fair ways. And — to riff on a famous line from Monty Python — that's nobody's fault. Not even the Romans. It's nobody's fault, not even the Romans, that life isn't fair. Some people are born into different classes, different castes, different races, religions, moments in history. None of that is fair.

Now the other word that gets confused with fairness: justice. Justice is what we do in the face of life's unfairness. Do you hear me? Justice is what we do in the face of life's unfairness.

Candice talked about equity this morning. Justice is: the manatee gets the band-aid on his injured ankle — not his hand. Now, I couldn't see from back here, so I had no idea what was going on — I had no idea all the animals were getting the band-aid in the same place; I was like, I don't know what she's going after. But then she said it, and I was like: oh, I get it now. I see the bit. It just didn't work from backstage. But you get what we're talking about, right? You actually have to show up, and listen, and say: this is where your woundedness is. I'm going to accept obligation, as a member of your community, to hold space for your healing — because I love you. Now you have a right to heal. You didn't have a right to heal before somebody showed up and said: I will hold space for you. I will send my love to you. I will nurture you in this time when the world is hurting you.

We produce that space for each other. The space is the freedom we want. The space is justice lived — justice enacted. The space is the world of rights that we yearn after. But it can't be an ethereal thing. It's not floating out there, waiting for us to conceptualize it. It's growing up from the ground of all the little decisions we make every day. It's a garden. It's a garden that grows up from what we cultivate. And so we have to go do our tilling, and our fertilizing, and our weeding, in that garden of responsibility, to produce the space.

We want our kids to be out there playing and having a good time — so we have to start a stewardship campaign next month, and raise a bunch of pledge money, so we can hire our staff, and pay the mortgage on this building, and have our programs, to create the space for them to go do that. This isn't a stewardship-campaign speech — but you get the idea, right? The right to go play on a Sunday morning, under the watchful eyes of people who love you and want nothing but good things for you, in a space that's safe, with friends who've shown up that day — that right didn't materialize out of the ether. It happened when some people said: I'm willing to put my money, and my mouth, and my body, and my love, and my hands, and my sweat into making that happen. That's where rights come from. Rights come from the tilling of the soil of obligation.

But our narratives about freedom make us go — ugh. How many times have you said, about going to a friend's house or a family member's house: "yeah, I don't really want to go — I'm going out of obligation"? That's how we think about obligation. Maybe you don't. Maybe that's just me. Well — I know it's not just me. I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of various human beings who resonate with this language: "I can't go do this thing I want to do with you this weekend, because I've got a familial obligation."

If your obligations are the ground in which you plant resentment — that's what you're going to harvest. If your sense of obligation, in your life, is a place where you plant your resentments, you know what your harvest is going to be. And it's going to smell and taste like resentment. Because that's what you planted.

Now — I've got a new phrase I'm developing; you can tell me if you like it: I see the rabbit hole. I'm going to walk around it, but I'm not going to fall in. So I'm not going to fall down this rabbit hole of the whole familial-obligation dynamic — that's a three-sermon series all on its own. But let me just say this. When you have that moment of "I'm doing this out of obligation," what you're really saying is that this obligation you're sensing isn't your obligation — it's about other people's expectations, rather than your sense of what you want to cultivate. So I'm going to give you two choices. Super easy. (I wanted to use an expletive just now. I'm going to not. You have to own your stuff — I own my stuff.) Okay: either "I am choosing to go, and I'm going to go and be there, because what I want to cultivate is a relationship with those people" — or, "I am not. There is nothing there that I either can cultivate or want to cultivate, and I'm going to make the other choice — and everybody, including me, gets to live with the consequence of other people having unmet expectations." It happens. Some of y'all are going to have some unmet expectations this morning, no matter what I say. It's okay. There's a — I won't call it a bell curve; who knows what shape it is — but there's a shape of expectations out there in the room. And for some of you, what I say up here today will ding the little bell in your heart that needed to be rung this morning, and you'll be like: oh, I'm so glad I went. Others of you might leave thinking: yeah, he just didn't do it for me today. Whatever. What are you gonna do? It happens. Am I going to hit every heart in the room, every day? I'm going to try. I'm going to try to till the soil of looking out there in the audience, and feeling who's got a scraped elbow, who's got a bruised knee — and how can I lay out a buffet, say, of spiritual work, that lets you go pick up the thing you need for what's on your heart today. I try to do that. Imperfectly as it may be.

[consulting the outline] I'm going to skip that — Simone, you're just way down the rabbit hole on that one. All right. Yeah. Here we go. I'll do this one.

I've been preaching a lot up here, since the New Year — I didn't pick it as a theme, but it emerged as one — that life is a gift and not an entitlement. So now I want to wrap in, for you, the idea that this morning's message about rights and obligations is just another petal on that plant. Another leaf on it. A new stem. Not something different or separate from it. Let's see if we can make that work.

If the space of rights emerges, for others, out of our acceptance of an obligation — then rights are a gift we give one another. They are a gift. I gift you free playground time, young ones, by accepting the obligation of cultivating the work of maintaining this community. Not the fun parts — the work parts. The parts that are hard. I mean, it's not always that way — play is a natural way of learning, and sometimes we get to show up here week after week and most of it's fun, and that's pretty cool. But in any real community, conflict happens. Difficult times happen. Things in the outside world change.

I saw it yesterday. I had three implosions in my life happen yesterday. And honestly, in my humble opinion, none of them happens if we weren't at war. Let me talk about what I mean by that. We all have a certain amount of emotional bandwidth to deal with what's happening. And as the sea level out there in the general culture rises — as the anxiety level rises, and the likelihood of catastrophe rises — the amount of available bandwidth we have left, to deal with the everyday trials and tribulations of being one human with one another, gets smaller. And so we find ourselves snapping at our loved ones, or our partner, or having a fight we probably wouldn't have had otherwise. And it's kind of about the little thing that happened in that little relationship — but it's also happening because of this sea of shared experience and emotion that we all exist on. That sea of shared emotion and experience — some people call it God, and some people call it community, and some people call it Gaia, or the life force. But its resonance patterns in our lives are real and observable. That's why all the civilizations and cultures and philosophers and mystics talk about it: they're like, "oh — maybe I ought not ignore this thing and pretend it's not happening."

So. The deeper parallel I'm trying to get to, in this space between gift and entitlement, rights and obligations, looks like this. I don't think I wrote it clearly — so let me put my paper down and try it another way.

If I show up to my awakening in the morning entitled — "I deserve this day; this day is my birthright" — that language, that tone of showing up, is the rights-entitled language. An entitled perspective says: I have rights, but no obligations. That is entitlement. A gift perspective, on the other hand, shows up and says: I'm not owed anything — but I have been gifted. How may I gift in return? And "how may I gift in return?" is the answer to the question of how you can have obligation that doesn't smell like resentment. What do I do with this gift of another beautiful day? How do I share that beautiful day with the people I love? That is an agreement to take the mantle of obligation, settle it on your shoulders, and get about your day. How do I share this gift that I received due to no special deservedness on my part — just the gift of waking up another day, and everything in the universe that had to happen so that that could happen for me, mysteriously, magically, unfolded — and here I am?

I don't wake up like that most days. I wish I did. I'm working on it. I am trying to cultivate that — I know how much more generous I would be if that were my first thought upon waking every morning. I usually still start most days with a little bit of the-alarm-went-off-too-early resentment.

If life is a gift, it shifts us from a hoarding mentality to a generosity mentality. And out of generosity, we become willing to take on obligations to one another — to create justice — instead of worrying that we have to keep enough to ourselves so that our sense of entitlement gets to continue.

If Simone Weil were defining beloved community, she would say: beloved community is not where everyone gets their rights. It's where everyone takes up their obligations.

Amen.

[00:26:32] Eric Hepburn (host outro): Until next time — thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can help others find it by liking and subscribing. If you'd like to support the podcast directly, you can make a donation at sangabrieluu.org/give. The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted on Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Andrea McDaniel. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn. See you in a few weeks.